So I’m working on adding a little button to a Firefox toolbar. If you click the button, it performs a default action. If you click a little arrow next to the button, it produces a menupopup from which you may choose another action. For an example, check out the Forward and Back buttons in Firefox. Clicking the main button moves you forward or backward; clicking the arrow produces a list of where you’ve been or where you can go. The thing is that by default, this sort of toolbar button is kind of big, and I want a tiny, unobtrusive little button. So I’ve been experimenting with different ways of implementing the button. In one case, it’s fairly small, but it’s got an extra arrow icon and has some extra horizontal space as a label placeholder, even though I don’t want a label.

My latest iteration breaks new ground in UI design. If you look carefully, you’ll see that there’s a little green bullet sort of thing (an icon squished down) and then a button wrapped around this small button in the shape of a sideways “U.” If you click the wrapping button, sure enough, you get the popup. If you click the inner button, you get the default behavior. I fully expect this sort of button to begin appearing in software packages very soon.

No, this isn’t a joke, though it made me laugh. To date, Lennie has had very little awareness of anything outside a radius of maybe three feet of where she happens to be sitting. That appears to be changing. She’s gotten to where she’ll take off crawling in some direction, then suddenly stop, turn around, and look back at where she came from with a big grin. She’s clearly developing a sense of “I was there where you are, and now I’m over here,” but until just recently, it’s still been her-centric; it’s been her going away and thinking “I was there.”

So this afternoon, I was locked up in my office working, music blaring and oblivious to the rest of the household. All of a sudden, I hear a knocking at my door. It’s pretty low down on the door, as if the cat is batting at the door, which he dometimes does. But it’s a more firm knocking than the pawing the cat usually manages. And it keeps going. So I get up to see what’s going on (suspicious that it might be Lennie and curious as to why she’s roaming around unsupervised knocking on doors), and sure enough, when I open the door, there’s Lennie beaming up at me proudly.

And there’s Mleeka, who had the impulse to pick Lennie up but just couldn’t resist witnessing the cuteness. Which I appreciated.

So now there’s an “otherness” sort of component to Lennie’s awareness. It was “I hear something in there, and think I’ll go investigate.” I like to think there was also something of “Hey, my daddy’s in there playing without me, and I think I’ll go join in the fun because he’s pretty much my favorite person ever” going on in her head but I’m not equipped to prove it, so I’ll withold the hypothesis for now.